Farewell TLS

I'm seriously contemplating letting my subscription to The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) lapse this year. I can't remember when I first subscribed. Certainly, it was more than twenty years ago. I think I first signed up as a treat to myself when I moved to Virginia to take a job in Washington, DC. I was abandoning, or so I thought at the time, my life as a scholar, and I figured TLS would let me keep an eye on things, albeit from a distance. But that's only part of the story. My fascination with TLS goes back to Larry McMurtry's All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. There was a character in that book, a professor of sociology, a ne'er-do-well know-it-all Englishman, who confesses in a moment of weakness and honesty that his vast store of erudite patter comes not from books, but from reading TLS regularly.

Later, after I became a regular reader myself, I understood exactly what he meant. TLS really is the best coverage there is for the entire universe of knowledge, excepting of course the most technical fields. In its pages one can read informative reviews of the latest works in all areas of what we call the humanities and the arts, but also in the sciences, including more general publications in the fields of biology, physics, medicine, and others. For a time I read every issue from cover to cover, not always on arrival, but eventually, even when that might be months later. But the problem with TLS is it comes every week, and each issue is about forty four-column folio size pages. Even just scanning for the best articles can take the good part of an entire day.

But it was always time well spent, and when I was working and regularly commuting a couple of hours a day on Washington's Metrorail, I got a lot of reading done on the train. In my line of work -- reviewing grant applications in all the disciplines of the humanities -- TLS was the perfect way to keep up. More than once one of my colleagues expressed surprise that I would know about something so apparently outside my own field of expertise, and I would recall that episode from McMurtry's novel.

There are many features of TLS I will miss: the snarky and often hilarious letters, the commentary section in the middle pages, the always amusing NB on the back page. Most of all I will miss Hugo Williams' freelance essays. For a time when Williams' essays were appearing in nearly every issue, I made sure to read them even when I skipped over almost everything else. But like the rest of us Williams has grown older and now has more serious matters to contemplate than his weekly essays for TLS. Others have come along to help fill the void, but it's not the same. I miss his whimsy and nostalgic recollections of friends and family.

Times have changed for me as well. I have more free time but also many more interests and distractions. It has become increasingly difficult to keep up with TLS, the NYRB, The New Yorker, and The Sewanee Review, as well as all of my other reading. As I watch weekly issues piling up on the coffee table I begin to feel the loss of so many trees that have been pulped only to languish awaiting my roving attention. I know I'm probably not alone in this, but the guilt is becoming too much. And so somewhat reluctantly I am saying farewell, at least for now, to one of my old favorites. Of course, a lot more Hugo Williams might have kept me going a bit longer.